• From stealing Einstein’s most precious possession to marriage that goes beyond death,
we count 15 of the most bizarre ways people have used a corpse.
This will contain real images of dead people, or at least parts of them, as well as some
pretty gruesome tales, so if you don’t want to see or hear that sort of thing, you’ve
definitely clicked on the wrong video. 15 - Stealing From Einstein,
• Albert Einstein is easily the most famous scientist in modern history, during his time
he was also highly esteemed for his amazing breakthroughs in science, but he knew this
would cause a problem. • He knew that if he didn’t specify otherwise,
people would study his brain when he died, so he left specific instructions for it to
be burnt when he died. • The person in charge of his cremation
ignored this remark, lied about it and said he wanted this to happen and studied the crap
out of his brain, but as Einstein predicted the physicality of his brain wasn’t even
that special, relatively speaking of course. 14 - Shrunken Heads,
• Headhunting has been a pretty common practice for quite a while now, not only in tribal
colonies, but also with the Vikings, but only the Jivaroan tribes from Amazon actually partake
in the act of shrinking their victim’s heads. • The shrinking is done by removing the
skull, putting seeds in the eyes and sewing and pinning the eyes and ears, then they boil
it in tannin rich water, dry it out with hot rocks and sand and then rubbing with charcoal
ash. • The reason they put the charcoal on it
is to prevent the soul of their victim from escaping, which regardless of your beliefs
is a pretty fucked up thing to want to do. 13 - Launched into Space,
• Now I don’t know about you, but getting a burial by launching your remains into space
sounds pretty cool, I don’t even consider the act to be that bizarre and maybe that
makes me weird, but I digress. • The strange thing that NASA did with corpses,
or ‘cadavers’ is to use them to figuratively crash test their in development rocket designed
to explore space, the people who used to own the corpses donated their bodies to science,
so it’s all legal and stuff. • They also used some mannequins along-side
the corpses and the test flight ended successfully after orbiting the Earth twice.
12 - Eat a Brick, • The plague was a pretty big deal in the
middle-ages, as was the fear of the unknown and scientific knowledge wasn’t exactly
great so people tended to be pretty superstitious, to put it extremely lightly.
• Long story short, some Italian researchers found what they believed the ancient venetians
believed to be a vampire amongst a huge amount of plague victims.
• When you think of making a vampire stay dead, you think of a stake through the heart,
but this predates modern vampirism, instead they believed that you needed to remove the
‘shroud’ AKA bacteria that caused mouth bleeding beyond death, and shove a brick in
its mouth to stop it from rising again. 11 - Cups and Tools,
• Not everyone makes a big deal about death, especially not for some of those with a strong
belief that there’s something beyond the grave; this is especially true of the Teotihuacanos
of ancient Mexico who just buried their families under and around their house.
• That’s not all, they also used any adult bones that could be useful in making tools
and utensils, that’s right, they used their dead loved ones for spatulas, that’s not
a random utensil I picked out of my draw, it’s one of the types of utensils found
in Teotihuacan. • Then there’s also the infamous skull
cups, which was a pretty common thing to do in warlike cultures like the Vikings, even
the infamous BlackBeard was apparently turned into a bone and silver goblet, if you believe
the tales. • Even if you don’t there’s totally
some real skull cups out there you can see in certain museums.
10 - Paranormal Mishap, • There has yet to be any solid proof of
an alien, there’s been plenty different attempts at proving or justifying their existence
through science and many more attempts of looking for them among us as part of a conspiracy
or just wishful/fearful thinking. • Well one group claimed they had found
the proof of your classic grey alien everyone had been looking for, they made a big ruckus
about it and charged people admittance to see it in person or to see it online.
• But before the reveal took place Tony Braglia, a big part of the event, issued an
apology saying that it turns out it was the mummified-corpse of a Native-American child
who died a long time ago, claiming that he was duped and that he felt bad about the whole
thing. 9 - False Mummy,
• A mummy of a Persian princess turned up in Pakistan during a police raid in the year
2000, this sparked up a huge amount of publicity and the archaeological community got excited
about the first ever Persian mummy. • The finders told everyone that she was
over 2,600 years old, her body was dressed in gold, there was an inscription saying her
and her father’s names and she was prepared in the same way as the Egyptians.
• Eventually some inconsistencies turned up, like grammatical errors and irregularities
in how she was mummified. • They eventually found out that she was
just a girl that had died in the recent past, from the looks of it her death wasn’t natural
as she had a broken neck. 8 – Exhibition,
• Taxidermy is when you take the skin of an animal and stretch it over a cast in order
to make it look alive, of course you add some glass eyes and pretty it up a bit, but the
general idea is that it looks like the animal. • Well this doesn’t work quite so well
with humans, but there’s another technique called plastination, made by Gunther von Hagens,
where the liquids in the body are carefully replaced with plastics, this doesn’t work
with the skin on, but it does wonders for showing off the anatomy of the corpse.
• Well there’s an entire exhibit called Body Worlds that displays 25 different plastinated
corpses in educational ways, sometimes showing the effects of diseases, other times showing
off the process of aging, this of course caused absolutely no controversy whatsoever with
anyone, anywhere, anytime. 7 – How He Died,
• The Shroud of Turin is a sacred Christian artefact that the church believes to be the
burial shroud of Jesus and it has been the subject of a lot of debate, regarding its
authenticity and in one case, how Jesus spent his final hours.
• Frederick Thomas Zugibe used the shroud to study how Jesus died, but
he didn’t only use the shroud, he also got in volunteers and strapped them to a cross.
• Of course that’s not all he did, he also used corpses and did a more authentic
replication of Jesus’s crucifixion. 6 – One Last Snap,
• When photography was made cheaper than portraiture in the Victorian era a lot of
the lower classes ended up getting a chance to get their likeness preserved beyond their
own mortality. • But some people took this idea to the
next extreme, deciding to take pictures of the recently departed, all dressed up and
seated carefully, sometimes they were attempts to make them look lifelike.
• This was most common with children, as infant mortality was still incredibly high
with no small thanks to the fact that most Victorians believed that smell and not germs
was what spread disease. 5 - Mummy Medicine,
• Speaking of the crappy medicine of yesteryear, mummies really had a hard time with it all,
the frankly arcane aspects of medicine had many of them suffering well beyond what they
should have to endure. • For some reason people thought that it
was a good idea to grind up Egyptian mummies and turn them into a ‘medicine’, as they
thought the bodies turning black was caused by a large amount of asphaltum.
• In reality the blackening was caused by the process of decay and besides all of that
asphaltum has no medicinal properties. 4 - Sold into Marriage,
• While arranged marriages were much more popular in the old days they’re still very
much practiced to this day throughout the world, although not so much in western countries.
• The classic line in the vows is ‘til’ death does us part’ but this isn’t so
with all weddings, there are cases when it’s practiced with one or more of the participants
being dead, that’s right some people are currently married to a corpse.
• This is mostly done in China, but it’s been found very much world-wide, including
countries like France. • It’s not done for shits and giggles
or dare I say an unholy love, it’s actually done with the same reasoning behind arranged
marriages, to wed two different families and to exchange dowries and land.
3 – Frankenstein, • You probably groaned inwardly when you
heard me say that name, just waiting with dread for me to get it wrong, don’t worry
I know Frankenstein was actually the beloved puppy of the scientist.
• Anyways, onto a more serious topic, George Forster was found to be guilty of killing
his wife and child, although later examination of the trial deems it unfair, he was sentenced
to death by hanging. • After his death his body was given to
the scientist Giovani Aldini for experimentation, Aldini was interested in something called
galvanisation, to which he applied onto Forster. • Galvanisation is just another term for
‘zap the shit out of that body’ which he did, as he did to others, his corpse was
described as having a quivering jaw, contorting muscles, a clenched fist and an opened eye.
2 - Snow White, • This picture turned up on the internet
a while ago, where a teen mother is holding her presumed miscarried, underdeveloped daughters
long gone corpse and posting it on Facebook in a Snow White costume.
• It’s hard to tell if she’s in massive denial or not, or she’s just really not
taking it well, but either way it’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever come
across. • Obviously it’s also incredibly depressing,
nothing in that picture speaks of someone who’s of her right mind, but hopefully she’s
feeling better about the whole thing now, or is at the very least getting the help she
needs. 1 - Corpse Pants
• Now to lighten the mood back up, what say you to some fancy leather pants, what
kind of leather you ask? Well only the best kind, as the previous skin owner has to give
permission for his skin to be used. • This is an Icelandic tradition where you
flay the skin of a permissive dead, put on his, yes it has to be a guy, skin and place
a coin from a stolen widow in the bollix along with this magical sign.
• When you’re done you’ve got a magical scrotum that will always have money in it,
but in order to take the pants off you need to convince someone else to overtake the pants
and step into each leg as the other person climbs out.
• If you do it right you’ll keep the money-gathering nature going on for generations! If you can
find something more bizarre than a magic corpse pants with money giving scrotums I’ll be
amazed.